According to the 2016 Texas Republican Party platform (or more exactly, the "Report of the Permanent Committee on Platform and Resolutions as Amended and Adopted by the 2016 State Convention of the Republican Party of Texas"), Homosexuality is a chosen behavior […] that has been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nations founders, […]
Barbara Phillips Long sent in a link to Cari Romm, "Why You Sometimes Mix Up Your Friend’s Name With Your Dog’s Name", New York Magazine 5/19/2016: Every so often, my mother, in a mental search for my name, will run through what seems like the entire family tree — she’ll say the names of my brother, her […]
The Blizzard Challenge needs you! Every year since 2005, an ad hoc group of speech technology researchers has held a "Blizzard Challenge", under the aegis of the Speech Synthesis Special Interest Group (SYNSIG) of the International Speech Communication Association. The general idea is simple: Competitors take a released speech database, build a synthetic voice from the data […]
This morning I was awakened by a bird calling outside my window, "m*ll*n*y m*l*rk*y", or maybe it was some squirrel chattering (I was half asleep and couldn't be sure which it was). Since I was unable to distinguish the vowels clearly, I couldn't tell exactly what the call / chatter was, but the bird / […]
I know I've been a long-time critic of everything in The Elements of Style, not least William Strunk's platitude that you should omit needless words. "Needless" is not defined even vaguely; nobody really writes in a way that sticks to the absolute minimum word count; and if neophyte writers could tell what was needless they […]
The Political TV Ad Archive: The Political TV Ad Archive is a project of the Internet Archive. This site provides a searchable, viewable, and shareable online archive of 2016 political TV ads, married with fact-checking and reporting citizens can trust. Political TV ad spending is expected to be in the billions. Yet the same local […]
For various reasons I recently downloaded snapshots of Wikipedia in various languages, and I'd like to share with you some discoveries, starting with article length in the English Wikipedia.
Is this the future of English pronouns? Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning takes place in a world where he/she is as quaintly obsolete as thee/thou. From the book's opening: You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of […]
In a comment on one of yesterday's posts ("Adjectives and Adverbs"), Q. Pheevr wrote: It's hard to tell with just four speakers to go on, but it looks as if there could be some kind of correlation between the ADV:ADJ ratio and the V:N ratio (as might be expected given that adjectives canonically modify nouns […]
…is "Tardy Mark", at least according to one roll of the dice by The Daily Show's Trump Nickname Generator:
This is a guest post by David Moser of Beijing Capital Normal University For those of us who teach and research the Chinese language, it is often difficult to describe how the Chinese characters function in conveying meaning and sound, and it’s always a particular challenge to explain how the writing system differs from the […]
A puzzling note arrived in my inbox a few days ago: I came across an article you wrote about the use of adverbs and adjectives. To count the use of adverbs and adjectives you actually wrote a program. Is this something you would be willing to share or give me some advice on how to create […]